Author
AFS & RM - August Sound Coalition
Picture the Homeless, an organization in NYC, run by homeless people, organized a "Sleep-In" in Central Park on Nov 9, to protest the harrassment and selective enforcement that homeless people face.
On a cold night in NYC, people gathered at a gazebo inside the Rambles in Central Park, NYC, to sleep. The police were informed in a release of the event and showed up with a number of vans, cars and officers. 6 people were arrested for breaking a park rule of sleeping in the park (not a law). One person was detained in jail for 36 hours, and released by the judge who agreed that it was a rule and not a law which was broken, and hence there were no grounds to continue any detention, based on breaking this rule against sleeping in the park.
The recording excerpt is from the next day and follows organizers as they leave the office and go to the next day's press conference. Interviews with Lynn Lewis and John Jones among others.
Audio segment is 10 mins. Edited by Rebecca M.
Picture the Homeless, an organization in NYC, run by homeless people, organized a "Sleep-In" in Central Park on Nov 9, to protest the harrassment and selective enforcement that homeless people face.
On a cold night in NYC, people gathered at a gazebo inside the Rambles in Central Park, NYC, to sleep. The police were informed in a release of the event and showed up with a number of vans, cars and officers. 6 people were arrested for breaking a park rule of sleeping in the park (not a law). One person was detained in jail for 36 hours, and released by the judge who agreed that it was a rule and not a law which was broken, and hence there were no grounds to continue any detention, based on breaking this rule against sleeping in the park.
The recording excerpt is from the next day and follows organizers as they leave the office and go to the next day's press conference. Interviews with Lynn Lewis and John Jones among others.
The following text is from the press release of the event:
"I wanted to let you know about a press conference and a Sleep-Out/civil-disobedience action of Picture the Homeless for which I am
asking for your support.
On Tuesday night (turning into Wednesday morning) Picture the Homeless is going to have a press conference in the Rambles section of Central Park. The occasion is the release of a national civil rights report of the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) this Tuesday. According to this report, New York is among the top 10 "meanest cities".
After the press conference that will end at 1am - when the park "closes" -
we will (try to) sleep right there in the park in a gazebo. Since we also
informed the NYPD about the sleep out, we expect also to hand them over a copy of the civil rights report shortly after 1am. Cops will probably not
let us sleep, but arrest us, manifesting the criminalization of homelessness. But if they don't, and we stay and sleep there until 6am when the park opens, it will set an important precedent.
...The gazebo where we're gonna have the press-conference/sleep out, is where some of our folks often hang out and stay overnight. Clearly, also elsewhere homeless people are ticketed or arrested for sleeping in the public - in the parks because of some "regulations", on the street, in Penn station, Port Authority, in the trains etc. because of "disorderly conduct", "obstructing pedestrian traffic", "trespassing" etc.
With this action, we protest the criminalization of homeless people
performing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping, sitting, or seeking
employment as day laborers..."
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